Here are some more reviews of films from the ongoing Japanese Film Festival Online:
Beginning as a four episode ONA (Original Net Animation), Yasuhiro Yoshiura's Patema Inverted is high-concept science fiction anime film with a lush and vast world and spectacular worldbuilding. Princess Patema is an adventurous girl who lives in an underground city. One day she falls from one of the city's endless pits and finds herself upside down, about to fall into the sky (it makes sense once you see it). Thankfully a boy, Age, manages to catch her and hide her from the authorities of his dystopian government. According to that government, people like Patema are sinners and must be eliminated to preserve societal harmony.
What follows is a fun, almost Ghibli-esque adventure as Patema and Age learn the truth of their world. It's all fun and interesting stuff, but what sets Patema Inverted apart from its Ghibli counterparts are the characters. The film tries its darndest to pair the two protagonists with each other, but they barely interact before one is kidnapped. If anything, Age has more interactions with another underground dweller, Porto, than Patema herself. Perhaps the film would have been better served in a longer, serialized format, but the filmmakers had to make do with what they had. That said, many filmmakers (including Yoshiura himself, in his later works) have done so much more with less.
As a work of animated art, the film is wonderful. Yoshiura uses the most of the "inverted" gimmick to disorient viewers both literally and figuratively - the third act twist, in fact, is almost worth the watch for that alone. Unfortunately Yoshiura hasn't been making a lot of stuff since this film and Time of Eve, as he mostly made short films or helped out with big films like one of the Rebuild of Evangelion movies, so this is a prime time to check some of his works out.
Air travel brings with it a certain kind of nostalgia nowadays, since most people don't have the urge to go on a trip either because travelers generally don't want to risk it or many places aren't open for tourists.
Happy Flight, a relatively early film from Shinobu Yaguchi (Waterboys, Survival Family) evokes a time that seems so distant considering the world we live in now: a time when air travel was unconstrained and a regular part of daily life. As many other reviews have no doubt noted, the poster is misleading: this is not a romantic comedy featuring Haruka Ayase and Seiichi Tanabe, but an ensemble piece. In fact, Ayase (perhaps the most high profile actor in this ensemble today) has only a minor arc compared to the arcs of the other characters.
The film follows a group of workers in the air travel industry as they handle a flight from Haneda to Honolulu. And it's not limited to the people inside the aircraft, either: everyone from air traffic controllers on the ground, to check-in staff, to flight planners, to mechanics, to people scaring away birds from the runway - all of them have a story here. Just as people say it takes a village to raise a child, it takes something even bigger to fly a plane.
Though the film only touches lightly on interpersonal relationships (to be fair, I don't think the film has time for that given how many characters it has) it hyperfocuses on the many interconnected parts that guide a plane through the skies. Through that, Yaguchi still manages to tell some interesting stories: Haruka Ayase as the inexperienced but well meaning flight attendant, Shinobu Terajima as a veteran guiding Ayase's character, Ittoku Kishibe as an old pro trying to get used to computerization as air traffic management moves towards the digital age.
With an engrossing third act, Happy Flight is a late 2000s classic and one of the festival's most entertaining films. Give it a try if you have the time.
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